Opinion | How my family and I are preserving a slice of Chinese-American history
- I have been collecting my father’s memories, one recording at a time, for two years
- If the Chinese-American community is to make a lasting mark on US history, greater efforts must be made to collect individual immigrant stories
Mondays are history evenings for my father and me. Since 2021, my father and I have had a standing phone call where I ask him a question related to a milestone in his life, or some aspect of how he feels about life, love and other broader topics. I tape the call and save the recording. A couple of years on, there are well over 100 recordings.
In the beginning, my father, who has spent much of his life and career as a professor, questioned the notion that his story would merit the time. “There are so many Chinese professors in the US and many of them are similar,” he said matter-of-factly. “Who else would be interested?”
Who would want to hear his life story that started in Shanghai and shifted to Hong Kong in his youth, before he became the first in his family (out of six brothers and sisters) to attend university overseas (McGill University) and began his journey to a tenured professorship? The immigrant story holds common themes, so would his be any different?
After I argued that preserving family roots was important to my sister and me, he decided to give the project a go.
My father was born in Shanghai on August 1, 1947, and first went to Hong Kong as a boy. To make ends meet in his university years, he cooked at Expo 67, the world’s fair, in Montreal in 1967, and moved timber at a lumberyard in Blind River, Canada.
After earning his PhD from Florida State University, he eventually found his way to the suburbs of New York City where he taught medical school students at New York Medical College. He sponsored his siblings to immigrate to the US, and helped them start new lives. In 2022, he retired after 45 years of service.
